Fingers crossed they kill the Games Store.
So that we can go back to the Steam monopoly?
If another company wants to make a Steam competitor on PC, go for it. EGS isn't a competitor, it's an internet scam.
Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
91–100 of 312 posts
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. I can confidently say that this factors in 0%. Layoffs were happening in the industry even before the LLM craze. And a 30% overal…
everyone looking for any reason when its obviously a massive recession due to govt. spending
Even if you agree that there was a recession the US exited it a year ago. The economy has been growing since last August.
This (and other layoffs) are a response to increased interest rates imposed to combat inflation. Companies don't have access to as cheap credit, so they're trying to appease shareholders by cutting costs to improve profitability.
This puts the brakes on the economy and may cause a recession if it goes too far. But the US economy is not currently in recession by any definition.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#93This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit cr…
The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely. Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO. Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indee…
> how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs?
The senior management delegates. At every moment your direct manager knows whom they are willing to part ways with if asked. Even if everyone on the team is great there is always some criteria (costs, impact on important project, institutional knowledge) that sets some people apart.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotal experience but most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles, where the expectation is that they will be replaced by AI and wishful thinking. Newly hired people were more junior and cheaper than previous employees so it makes no sense to fire them.
> most of the people I've seen being fired in one of the big ones are senior people working in customer facing roles Which industry? I’m seeing a lot of middle layers being reduced, but not the rainmakers.
I've seen this on the org I work, the whole 'engineer manager' layer was removed and replaced with wishful thinking (love that phrase!). The engineer managers had a good idea of how to manage teams and were doing team/tech lead work and coaching the team/tech leads, which didn't have much experience (mostly senior devs who didn't want to code any more).
This org in particular missed, in my eyes, where to cut. There is a number of engineers who cannot do much more than copy/paste code and the org has no wish to train them. Unfortunately, the org thinks that going wide (lots of teams, lots of people) is a good way to scale.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#95From the announcement: "The company also announced that it’s divesting Bandcamp, an online audio distribution platform it acquired last year"
I don't care a ton about Epic, but I love Bandcamp. It's my primary mechanism these days for discovering and acquiring music.
I was puzzled when Epic bought Bandcamp, apparently they were too. They're being kicked over to Songtradr -- I hope that's a neutral to good move, but I don't really know. Anybody know anything that could shed light on that?
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#96Fingers crossed they kill the Games Store.
Why?
The way they try to push their store is annoying, so people want them to fail outright.
I think few people will disagree that letting Valve have a de facto monopoly is a bad thing. But Epic's whole strategy around EGS seems built entirely around appealing to publishers and developers at the expense of making the platform desirable for users.
Their marquee feature is that they take a smaller cut of sales on their platform (12% vs Valve's 20-30%), but this savings never gets passed down to the customer. So from a user's perspective, this isn't a feature, it's a footnote with no real bearing on their decision making.
Where Valve has invested a lot of time and money into building out platform features that add value for the customer (Steam Play, Steam Input, Workshop, Big Picture Mode, a fairly reasonable refund system), Epic uses all their money to buy exclusivity deals. The platform itself is barebones. The client takes twice as long to load as Steam despite having 1/10th the feature set.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#97Unity also had 3 recent mass layoffs. I compiled their headcount since 2004 here: https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/the-growth-of-unity-in...
Unity merged with a bizarrely-managed malware company a while back and shouldn't be used as a measure of anything.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#98Fingers crossed they kill the Games Store.
So people complain about single stores on mobile devices, and then they wish for a single one in PC games, what an irony.
It would be stupid to be "against" competing stores on PC. PC is an open platform anybody can write any code they want on it. It's just a fact that Steam is the only good one by a mile. As long as all the others are dogshit, games exclusive to those stores may as well not exist.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fortnite is still a massive cash cow, but man they burn actual billions for the Epic Store which still isn't very epic and is missing most basic features.
It's actually mind blowing how much money they spend on user acquisition while the thing is still full of bugs! Why does it take ages to open? Why did downloading some games launch another launcher that downloaded the game again? Why did it sometimes not switch to idle when in the background and keep wasting CPU? Why does the UI sometimes just randomly not work? Why is every interaction with it so slow ? Why does it…
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Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game. I can confidently say that this factors in 0%. Layoffs were happening in the industry even before the LLM craze. And a 30% overal…
A lot of big shops are choking under bureaucracy and process right now, which is the sort of things LLMs are good at.
It's the opposite. LLMs are good after you make your way through the bureaucracy and end up with well defined specs and a ton of boilerplate code & tests to churn out. I'd say most devs are spending 90%+ of their time on the former.